Why Is The iPod King?

Written by William on August 7, 2006 at 8:56 AM

7 Aug

It just works, that’s why.

Suppose you wanted a digital audio player (DAP) that plays audio and video, including TV shows, audio and video podcasts. Suppose you wanted to use a single program to get all this content and sync to your DAP. Suppose you wanted to buy music onilne and download it to your DAP. Only Apple’s end-to-end solution will meet all of those needs. iTunes Music Store (iTMS) + iTunes + iPod = a simple experience that will meet all of those needs.

However, I don’t want an iPod, and I don’t like iTunes. I do like the iTMS though, and have bought TV shows from there. I turned to Apple’s biggest competitor in the DAP market, Creative.

I wanted to do everything stated in the second paragraph with my Creative Zen Vision:M (ZVM), and I learned the hard way that this simply is not possible.

With an iPod, you are locked into iTMS + iTunes. That isn’t much of a choice. When you pick a PlayForSure-friendly player like the ZVM, you are thrown into the opposite situation; you have too much choice. With so much choice, you end up with a haphazard collection of programs to do what iTMS + iTunes can do.

Let’s tackle them one-by-one:

Play audio: Easy enough. I use Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11) to sync to the ZVM. No issues here.
Play video: This is tricky. The iPod supports a very small set of video codecs, which generate files of extensions like .mov and .m4v. This looks like poor selection, until you realize that damn near any site that produces video has at least one version that is iPod-friendly. Finding video is no challenge for an iPod user. For everyone else, it can be difficult.
Buy TV shows: Yeah, it sounds crazy. Pay for TV? The TV I get for free? Yeah, well I’ve done it for Lost, and I don’t regret it. This option is currently only open for iPod users. For the rest of us, we have to turn to solutions that aren’t exactly legal. This has the benefit of being free, but also can be a pain in the ass. You can argue with me until you are blue in the face saying “it isn’t that hard to find a torrent, download the files, convert it to the proper format/size/whatever and copy it to your player,” but you will never convince me because that will not beat the iTMS solution: click to buy, download, sync to iPod. Simple and fast.
Audio podcasts: There are a myriad of programs that’ll download audio podcasts for you, like Juice or ZenCast. The problem with those programs is that I don’t want to use them. I use WMP11 to sync my ZVM. Since WMP11 is still in beta, I can only hope that they will add the iTunes-like functionality of downloading podcasts within it so I can uninstall the two programs I mentioned.
Video podcasts: This is my most troubling issue. It is really a combination of points 2 and 4, so there really isn’t a need to repeat myself.

To sum it up, I want WMP11 to be the center of my ZVM’s media library. I want it to download my podcasts and do video conversions on the fly to a format that my ZVM supports. I don’t want to be forced to use three different programs to do what iTMS can do by itself (I realize it doesn’t do video conversion, but so much of the video content on the web is already iPod-compatible so that is largely unnecessary).